


your hands are smeared with clean blood inside these walls

by simplysweetperfection (tinydemons)



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Historical AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 04:55:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2838773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinydemons/pseuds/simplysweetperfection
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carmilla arrives in West Berlin, a trail of pretty dead girls behind her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your hands are smeared with clean blood inside these walls

 

 

It's a new lifetime when Carmilla dreams of fire and ash and wakes up with the taste of it in her mouth for the third time this week. She chokes through a mouthful of hell and paints her dreams on blank canvas, afraid she might forget the sight of them.

Will stops by and plucks the girl from her bed when the night is only just beginning to fade into morning. He grins at the naked girl in Carmilla's sheets and tells her a new name, the last one still slung heavy over his shoulder.

Carmilla nods, her mouth full.

 

 

Carmilla arrives in West Berlin, a trail of pretty dead girls behind her. She finds a flat near the wall and spends most of her days reading and drinking until the world is jerked off its axis. Carmilla is content enough to hide away in the tiny space she has carved into the world with nails that cracked and broke bloody. Carmilla waits for Mother to call her, drinking and smoking and laughing when she doesn't cough as smoke gets caught in her lungs.

And she thought dying was the worst part of her living.

 

 

She screams until someone is pounding on her door.

 

 

Carmilla shoulders her bag, the one stuffed with clothes and books and charcoal, and crosses the city. She passes a bar with people spilling out into the street and a pair of soldiers trading a cigarette in a back alley, wall full of graffiti.

She thinks of the way it will wear and fade along with the years on Carmilla's back as she remains. She pictures the wall separating Berlin and imagines the way it will come undone under her hands. She shakes her head when she thinks of the people already eaten away in the ground who will never live to see the curtain pulled back and the world fused together once more, whole and spinning.

It reminds Carmilla of the time when the world was flat and spilling over the edges into space. She remembers thinking if she ran far enough maybe she could fall over it too, watching the earth shrink and fade as she fell down, down, down. Carmilla misses that thought.

Carmilla lights a cigarette and kicks at an empty paper cup abandoned on the sidewalk. She thinks about running in Berlin now, until the door to 307 opens and lips are warm against her own.

She takes the stairs two at a time and her heart is as close to beating as it has been in months, if not a year. She doesn't remember. It becomes too easy to lose track of time when Mother is whispering names against her cheek and women are thrashing under her tongue.

Her dead heart always aches and Carmilla has to remember Berlin to keep from finding the sharp end of splintered wood.

"There you are." Laura says after Carmilla knocks on the door and Laura smiles wide from the sight of her.

Carmilla drops her bag and kisses Laura until she takes the taste of ash from Carmilla and she remembers Berlin, Berlin, Berlin.

 

 

Laura is naked on her back by the time Carmilla manages to pull a blank piece of her sketchbook, crumpled and ripped at the corner. She smooths it on the back of a chair and Laura grins up at her. Her fingers twitch and the feeling of life is across her nerves when Laura snorts something about coming back to bed.

She draws the slope of the other woman, catching the blemish against the pink of Laura's neck and the mole across her shoulder. She engraves her likeness on paper until the charcoal is bleeding through onto her fingers, staining them dark over a crisscross of scars. She looks at the lovely peak of Laura's breasts and carves the image in her memory.

She tucks it deep enough that Mother will not be able to pry it from her cold dead fingers.

 

 

Mother comes two weeks after Carmilla returns from Paris. She says something about Styria, about _home_ , and drags Carmilla from beautiful Germany.

 

 

Carmilla is drunk on the roof of the library when Will finds her. He sits heavy next to her, the smell of blood, sex, and tequila radiating from him when he takes the bottle from her.

"Don't jump Kitty," he says with a laugh and a swig of whiskey.

Carmilla is silent, counting the number of times her bones have given out beneath her when she connects with the pavement below. She traces an unnatural bump on her ankle and tries to breath uselessly through her nose, keeping the thought of coffins and blood clotting in her throat from taking her.

Will shoulders her, dropping the bottle of booze from the ledge and watching as it smashes against the ground five stories down. Carmilla can see a dark bruise forming on his throat and the remnants of blood at the corners of his lips. He always was a messy eater, too eager to take and take. He winces a little with a roll of his arm but grins at Carmilla when she blinks at him.

She wonders if he would fight her if she were to take his neck beneath her hands and twist until the only sound they could hear is a sharp crack. Carmilla can see his broken body against pavement and the cry of their Mother when she pushes her trembling fingers through his dark hair.

Carmilla's hands twitch but they halt with a stuttering breath, imagining Mother's fury over Will's corpse. There are worse things than a coffin of blood, she is sure.

"Let's get something to eat," Will says after Carmilla has pressed her fingers against her thigh roughly, nails biting against the pale skin there. He stands quickly and laughs when Carmilla pushes his offered hand away.

Carmilla imagines the sharp snap of bone and follows.

 

 

The first time Carmilla was born it was to a father who loved her far too deeply and a mother who never loved her enough. It was an infancy of dresses and balls and chaste kisses to the corners of girls lips between their waltzing. Her first life was opium thrumming across her veins with giggles and cold baths as her distant mother brushed her fingers through Carmilla's wet hair.

Carmilla was born for the second time to screaming and blood and a fire that would not reduce her to ash. Mother was there to feed her slow sips of blood from a chalice of silver and wipe the sweat from her brow as she screamed and screamed. Carmilla was born angry and aching for life between her lips.

And there are some nights when Carmilla thinks she was born a third time. Laura's thigh is warm under her cheek and fingers are brushed through her hair gently, and it is far too easy to forget how terrible her deaths have been.

(Carmilla cannot forget the way she died in that coffin though, choking on a thing of life. She scratches at her temples and runs to the stars but she cannot shake the dark from her bones.)

 

 

Berlin is dancing and kisses and wet warmth around her fingers with a sharp thrust. Berlin is the space between the edges of the earth and the empty abyss below, the spot between endless death and life limited to days carved from Carmilla's skin.

Berlin is _Laura_ , where Carmilla can spit the ash from her mouth.

 

 

Laura's blood is warm across Carmilla's tongue when she loses the words. _I love you_. It is heavy against Laura's skin and Carmilla wants to pull them back inside, where she doesn't have to worry about her dead heart cradled in this clumsy human's palms. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and tries not to look at Laura's intent gaze.

She swallows, iron stuck between her teeth when Laura kisses her. "Me too," Laura whispers, a holy secret between the two, and pulls at Carmilla's hair.

 _IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou._ Carmilla kisses her and thinks she will never let Mother take this.

 

 

"The wall will come down one day," Laura says and Carmilla tries to breathe through the truth in her voice. "I'm going to be the first to break the news to the world when it does."

Carmilla smiles and believes.

 

 

Carmilla wakes with a heavy tongue and fire under her skin. She sees the damnation awaiting her and she feels the terror fill her gut until she is crouched on Laura's bed. Her back is slick with sweat and Laura is still sleeping next to Carmilla's trembling frame.

Carmilla stands, pacing in front of the bed four times before digging through her bag for a buried cigarette. Her fingers are shaking so hard it's difficult for Carmilla to light the damn thing, a deep whine building in her head. She tries to shake it from her, to breathe through her nose but it gets stuck on the memory of blood clotting in place. 

Laura mumbles something in her sleep and shifts, her hair spilled out across the pillow. Carmilla focuses on it and counts backwards from three hundred softly under her breath.

It's not easy, but by the time Laura wakes later into the night, Carmilla has calmed the waver in her hands to slight tremors that only appear if she holds her fingers in place for too long. Her palms are covered in paint and there is a canvas full of her terrors next to the window. Laura stretches and looks for Carmilla sleepily, a curious tilt to her head when she notices the painting in the corner.

Carmilla hands her a warm cup of coffee and ignores the worried gaze Laura gives her.

"We should go dancing tonight," Carmilla says into a bite of her stale croissant. She pictures Laura in a little dress and a shot in each hand, head thumping in time with the bass.

Laura swallows with a grimace and nods. "If that's what you want."

Carmilla swallows thick and tries to find the energy to run. The emotions for Laura sing from her chest and she wants to be able to forget it and forget the woman that will grow old and die and leave Carmilla alone on this rock. But Laura kisses her cheek and steals the rest of her croissant and says something about the latest piece she has been working on to fill the heavy silence. A deep affection fills her and Carmilla remembers just how damned her soul is.

Carmilla nods and lets her fingers flutter across Laura's thigh before she stands. She finds a knife in the kitchen, curved at the hilt, and walks to the painting in the corner. It's a mess of reds and oranges, of anger and fire and Laura's blood bursting on her tongue.

"What are you - " Laura starts before Carmilla slashes through the painting. It is a shredded mess of canvas by the time she is done, the picture unrecognizable.

"Carm," Laura says, her brow furrowed in worry.

Carmilla smiles. "Don't worry. It wasn't very good, anyways."

 

 

Carmilla dreams of ash and fire and Berlin and lauralauralauralaura.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know. i just don't even know so here is some 80s hollstein in germany i guess.


End file.
